Process as an analytical unit suited to historiography of the
twenty-first century

By Haines Brown, 13 September 2003

The most obvious thing about historical phenomena is that they
represent change in time. We may wish to describe an arbitrary
“initial state” of a system in terms of a set of
characteristics, and we might define its final outcome as the set of
features we observe at a time subsequent to the initial state and
functionally related to it. However, we are fully aware that these are
artificial constructs imposed on a fluid process that continually
changes and cannot be adequately described in terms of fixed
properties. An initial state and an outcome are arbitrary demarcations
in the continually flowing river of history.

While we have a clear subjective sense of change in the present and no
doubt of its reality in history, it is very difficult to convey it in
empirical terms—that is, in terms of a set of static
qualities. As soon as we associate some empirical quality with a
process, it ceases to be a process to become a static structure in
thought—a kind of Heisenberg indeterminancy principle, if you
will.

But let me step back a bit and make sure I've not outreached
shared assumptions. Most things are defined in the dictionary in terms
of their essential qualities. What is it that makes these particular
qualities “essential,” while others are mere passing
accidents? It turns out that it is those qualities that seem to
persist that are thought to be essential. We then proceed to use these
essential qualities to construct conceptual categories in terms of
which we are able to communicate with one another other about classes
of things. Accidental qualities, such as the color of an automobile,
serve only to distinguish the members of a class.

There's no denying that these quite artificial procedures work
quite well in practice because persistent qualities are by definition
the same ones perceived by the others with whom we come into
contact. The problem is that this utility is limited to a relatively
short range. It is meaningful for individuals, whose experience is
limited to mere decades (or centuries in cultural terms), and
geographically constrained (although we are becoming globalized today,
language still divides us). As we expand our view beyond that of the
individual or specific culture, its content becomes more complex and
change more evident.

That is why historiography, except for very local accounts, is not
biography writ large, for it finds complexity and change to be the
normal state of affairs, and consistency the exception. In history,
phenomena are in principle fluid and cannot be frozen in time by
static categories. In fact, there is no reason whatsoever to assume
that the useful conventions of daily life are at all appropriate in
historiography.

There are situations in which we do try to express change in empirical
terms. For example, a movie film represents movement by displaying a
succession of still frames. We derive from it the impression of motion
only because our sensory apparatus cannot distinguish such a rapid
succession of images and blurs them all together. A movie conveys an
illusion of motion, but we still lack the ability to represent it in
thought, to make dynamic processes an object of study.

Since change cannot really be represented in empirical terms, we must
try a different approach for defining an analytical unit if we expect
it to be appropriate for historiography.

In a way, this is not difficult. Change, after all, results from a
causal relation. A change in one thing is said to cause a change in
another to which it is causally connected. Since we are not at this
point trying to explain a particular change, but only how to represent
change in general in thought, the specifics of the cause are
unimportant, and merely its causal relation needs to be posited.

Of course, an appeal to a causal agent and its relation is quite
conventional in historical discourse. An event (empirical change
within a limited time and space) takes place, and the historian
explains it by reference to another event understood to be its
cause. Since the causal relation is “abstract” (refers to a
relation of qualities rather than the qualities themselves) rather
than empirical, it is not treated as primary data, but merely
secondary, as derivative. That is, in conventional historiography, a
causal relation is inferred between two events if they are
sufficiently proximate in time or place and if doing so satisfies
“common sense” (which makes up for the deficiencies of the
method).

There's no real (“tangible”) evidence that things are
causally interconnected, and so there is not the certainty enjoyed
when viewing the hard facts associated with the events
themselves. Therefore, in conventional historiography, empirical
qualities are definitive and primary, while their causal relations are
a posteriori and only inferred.

Useful as this may be in daily life, I would like to suggest that
prioritizing the empirical is a rather arbitrary and unrealistic
choice. I would like to suggest here that we could as well make the
causal relation a priori and explain change as its empirical
effect. However, we need to keep in mind that in reality causal
relations give rise to empirical change, and empirical change supports
causal relations, and so the issue is not which is really primary, but
which is best represented as primary in thought.

A possible objection to making causal relations primary is that
empirical data is felt to be the beginning and end of historical
investigation because the historian starts out with the certainty of
“hard facts” and uses them to arrive at an explanation of a
manifest empirical change. However, this is today no longer quite so
obvious.

We now know that there are no “pure” facts uncontaminated
by observational hypotheses. We now realize, without any necessary
implication of subjectivism, that facts are socially constructed. What
is evidence today was mere trash not long ago; facts important in
relation to one social group are irrelevant to another; our axiom set,
definitions, values and aims tend to shape profoundly what are the
facts, their character and their significance.

For example, we have all seen those spectacular images of the cosmos
produced by the Hubble telescope. Sometimes people have objected that
the skies don’t really appear in such extraordinary color, and
so the images must in some way be artificial. However, these images
are no more artificial than the impression of viewing the stars with
the naked eye through a backyard telescope, for the eye sees only a
small part of the spectrum. The colors in the Hubble images convey a
much richer truth than the eye can possibly see, and is no more
artificial than the image seen through our home telescope, and
actually there is more truth value contained in the Hubble images. In
either case, the images are mere analogues of the reality being
viewed, and are a function of the truth, not the raw truth itself.

If facts no longer seem to us quite so “hard,” and if causal
relations can only be inferred, that would seem to put the
historiographical enterprise on very thin ice indeed. Consequently, we
often end up with a skepticism greater than actually warranted. We
know that events took place in the past; we know that these were all
processes; and we expect knowledge of the past to be meaningful
because we find present processes to be so. A realist approach says:
start with what we know to be true, and then build the conceptual
equipment necessary to represent it in thought.

If all that we know is that there were processes, we must start with
causal relations. One might well suppose there must first be entities
to be causally connected, but that is not necessarily so. We can
define things as being what is at both ends of a causal relation and
go from there, and momentarily we will suggest that motion is an
intrinsic property of all things in the universe, and so we
don’t need to have proximate events for the source of changes.

Let me offer an example, for this shift in perspective might seem a
little bewildering. The term “social class” is usually
defined as a set of empirical qualities shared by its members. A
member of the aristocracy, then, is a person who acquires, one way or
the other, a set of legal privileges that supports his political
dominance in society. This is an example of an empiricist
definition. We have a group the members of which share a trait, and it
gives them a power advantage over other groups. Having established a
characteristic of the aristocracy, we might then infer from it a
causal relation with the peasantry that we probably can characterize
as exploitation.

However, there is an entirely different way to define social class,
which is to define it as those people who happen to share a common
causal relation. By convention, this causal relation (termed a
“relation of production”) is the relation of a person with the
means of production. Some people own or possess means of production,
and they are called the bourgeoisie (because people whose potentials
in life derived from owning means of production tended to live in
town). Some means of production can be very small, in which case a
member of the bourgeois class might work very hard for little return,
perhaps even less than that of a skilled member of the working
class. That is, income level is not here immediately definitive of
class position.

In our example, we start out with some idea of what we are looking
for, which is that members of the bourgeoisie develop through their
relation of production, but members of the modern working class, who
lack such means, must instead seek to develop through collective
struggles. Presuppositions would also be present if we instead start
out with empirical facts (infer exploitation from the fact of power
rations rather than infer classes from the fact of exploitation). In
both cases, the investigation is entered with certain axioms, values,
definitions and objectives. This is true of any scientific
endeavor. It is impossible and certainly undesirable to set out to
solve a problem with a tabula that is
entirely rasa.

One should not underestimate the implications of making a causal
relation definitive and from it infer an empirical change. For one
thing, it makes change primary, and stability only a possible and
somewhat exceptional effect of change. For example, the stability
represented by a “civilization” is an exception in prevailing
flux of history. While the narrower the scope of historical
investigation, the more one is able to employ empiricist categories
with some success, it can be argued that this is not a sufficient
reason for doing so. The issue is usually put in terms such as this:
while local history can make sense in narrowly local terms, to what
extent are explanations really sound until the local events are placed
in relation to long-range changes and broader influences?

However, starting with a causal relation does raise some
difficulties. For example, where does the empirical dimension then
come from? If we are walking along a woodland path and stumble on a
rock, its empirical existence intrudes on our daydreams in no
uncertain terms, but causal relations don’t do that. I’ll
come back to this momentarily, but in very general terms, new
empirical features arise from the constraints upon a causal relation
imposed by old empirical qualities. So now we end up obscuring the
origin of matter through infinite regress rather than obscuring the
ultimate engine of change. Nevertheless, we are better off because
matter is directly perceived, and it is not difficult for our
short-range outlook to grasp it in thought.

The ultimate basis of this general proposition lies in thermodynamic
cosmology, but let me offer here instead a very pedestrian example
that will be less troublesome. Suppose I am pouring through a sieve
some ungraded sand. The result is a structure that did not exist
before: a more or less regular cone-shaped heap consisting of grains
only under a certain size. How did this order arise? First, gravity,
which refers to the causal relation between the earth and the grains,
causes the sand to attempt to pass through the sieve, and those that
manage to do so form a cone-shaped heap also because of
gravity. However, the physical characteristics of the sieve play a
role, for it sorts the sand grains by size. The sieve is a structure
that existed initially and so is inherited from the past; it
constrains the degrees of freedom of the grains by preventing larger
ones from passing through. The resulting heap is a structure that
emerges in the future (in relation to the initial state).

So we see here a structure inherited from the past that constrains a
present causal relation so as to reduce the degrees of freedom of the
process and (of necessity) creates a new empirical structure in the
future.

This way of representing a process has three great advantages over the
usual empiricist policy of starting with the supposed “hard
facts:”

The structure that constrains the process reduces its degrees of
freedom. This is the equivalent of employing a probabilistic
causality that reconciles freedom and determinism. The initial
condition simply limits the number of possible outcomes. This is not
the place to elaborate the point, but it is worth noting that it
corresponds precisely to the probabilistic language usually employed
by historians. In a work of history, when it is said that the likely
outcome of a war favors one side or the other, the uncertainty is not
just a manifestation of an ignorance of all the factors involved, but
also of an understanding that the process could actually turn out
either way. History is full of surprises.

Usually, conventional history is limited to a time dimension that is
little more than a chronological sequence. An exception might be, for
example, a reference to the immaturity of a civilization to account
for its creativity and flexibility. Or the art historian might use the
term “baroque” in a generic sense of an extreme elaboration of
classic forms that mark the old age of a cultural tradition. Likewise,
when the historian's basic conceptual unit is a process, the
time dimension becomes real in that there is a past and future that
have a meaningful and not just chronological relation to a present.

A subtle, but very important point is that the structures that
constrain a process are passive. The conventional approach is to speak
of inherited “potentials” which mysteriously become historical
agents. However, the rock over which I stumbled in my walk is not an
active agent, but merely constrained the motion of my foot. That might
seem obvious, but how about the suggestion that ideas are a historical
force? This is often assumed, although it raises some very troubling
metaphysical issues that are close to superstition. How much more
realistic is it to suggest that it is we who are the historical
agents, and ideas merely constrain our degrees of freedom, encouraging
behavior that is constructive or at least purposeful.

I would like to end with two additional points that might help sharpen
the distinction between the conventional empiricist analytical unit
and one that represents it as process.

The laboratory model was a key notion in modern natural science, not
because of its method, hardly novel, but because of its ideological
implications. The laboratory walls served to isolate an experiment
from outside influences so that what takes place within has to be
solely the result of forces inherent in the objects under
investigation. Through repeated trials there arises a general law
which is understood to represent an essential truth of things. You can
put objects of a certain mass in motion and infer from their behavior
such a law as f=ma (force = mass x acceleration). Every time you try
the experiment, you obtained nearly the same result, and that tends to
validate the formula. It represents a universal law because, if the
behavior is intrinsic to all things, it must be is universally
present. The formula is thought to represent an essential truth of
objects, and we “explain” behavior by subsuming a particular
event under it.

The problem with this is that the law discovered in the laboratory is
to some extent merely an effect of the laboratory walls. That is,
deprived of a causal relation with the environment outside the
laboratory, any process taking place within it must be regular and
predictable (positively entropic).

Because the laws do seem to apply to isolated phenomena, meaning
becomes intrinsic to them, and practical success serves to validate
this atomistic view of reality in which the truth of things is
self-contained. The lonely individual therefore becomes the
appropriate historical agent as he makes optimal decisions for
himself. However, this makes a mystery of why the outcome of a
historical process is not entirely predictable and mechanically
determined. The laboratory model contradicts what we know of history,
which is that it is a creative or emergent process in which human
struggle in the present frees the future to some extent from the
burden of the past.

The other point that needs to be mentioned is that the presumption
that all things are always in motion has historically been a stumbling
block. Henri Bergson, for example, has been ridiculed for his
elan vitale—a mysterious inner force which accounts for
things’ emergence. However, empiricism merely sweeps the problem
under the rug. It represents change as an infinite regress as each
event is caused by another event, which in turn is the effect of yet
another. Ultimately there is no explanation of change at all. Newton,
for example, invested his atom with a metaphysical and thus profoundly
mysterious inner “sympathy,” which eventually become a
force of attraction. The shift only seems more naturalistic but in
fact hid a supernatural force behind its surface appearance.

However, in the last half century we have come to understood very well
why all things are in fact necessarily in motion. It is simply an
effect of the original state of the universe. As a result of the Big
Bang, the universe started out in a highly improbable state, and
according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, must return as quickly
as possible to a more probable state. That is, all things, in
themselves must “dissipate,” must experience an increase
in entropy, must move toward a more probable and less ordered
state. Everything is subject to this rule, not because of some
mysterious inner impulse, but because everything inherits an
improbable state from the original Big Bang.

That there are almost as many exceptions to this as there are
manifestations of it need not detain us here beyond pointing out that
dissipation can represent a “thermodynamic engine” that gives
rise to new structures in the universe. The emergence of novelty
almost equals its dissolution as the universe heads toward eventual
“heat death,” which is the most probable form of its energy.

These emergent structures constrain the universe’s dissipation
to give rise to time, which is why the universe did not dissipate
instantly as the case before the Big Bang “when” there was
a “perfect vacuum.” Time, then, is not mere chronological
sequence, but more importantly is an effect of a constraint upon
dissipation—the famous “arrow of time” which
distinguishes the past from the future.

Cosmic dissipation is the ultimate engine of change, but causal
relations are its form. That is, it is the dissipation of an
improbable state that drives change, but the vehicle of change is the
dissipation of specific things, which affect the other things with
which they are causally connected.

In short, there are a variety of reasons why the most obvious basic
analytical unit to be employed in historiography should be the
process. That realization arose in the late nineteenth century, but
was quickly buried by the prevailing positivist paradigm. However, at
the same time there began to arise a number of developments in the
natural sciences which revealed the limitations of the paradigm:
thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, general systems theory,
etc., which can now support a viable alternative to an empiricist
analytical unit in historiography.

There is no reason whatsoever why historians of the twenty-first
century should continue with an antiquated ideology that arose under
very specific political and economic circumstances. Whatever
ideological forms arise in the historiographic conceptions of the
present century, there seems no question but that the basic unit of
analysis must be dynamic rather than static. The process as we have
defined it here offers one approach to that end.